Deighton's many spies in the cold

Far fewer Indians have heard of Len Deighton than of John le Carre. But in my book Deighton is every bit as good a writer of spy novels set during the Cold War as le Carre was.

One clear indicator of how good his books are is the number that have been made into films —The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Spy Story and the Billion Dollar Brain. All old gold.  Ipcress File, by the way, was published in 1962, a year before le Carre’s Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

Unlike le Carre who went to Eton, Deighton was educated locally in London. But if le Carre had his George Smiley, Deighton has Bernard Sampson who grows up in post-1945 Berlin because his father, too, was a spy.

Sampson is your classic anti-hero, quite the opposite of James Bond. And far more justifiably than JFK in 1961, he can say “Ich bin ein Berliner”. He grew up in the rubble to which Berlin had been reduced.

He is seen as a German by the British and a Brit by the Germans. No one trusts him fully. Like Smiley’s wife Ann who abandons him, Bernard’s, too, leaves him and runs off to East Germany. She was his boss, too. But it’s never made clear who she is actually working for.

Chance find

I came across Deighton by sheer accident in a hotel in Darjeeling in 1985. I had seen the films without wanting to read the books.

I had been sent to Darjeeling by the editor to accompany the commerce minister. I was the lone journalist because the ministry had actually invited Swaminathan Aiyar, who was working for The Indian Express then. He wasn’t available so they sent me instead, as a sort of counterfeit Swami or “number 2 ka maal”. 

I was in The Financial Express then. Someone had left a copy of a book called Horse Under Water in the room and I started reading it — and became an instant admirer. So I simply brought away the book and soon started looking for more Deighton.

I found them in proper bookshops, of course, but also on pavement shops which have now vanished and those ubiquitous lending libraries in small local markets. The pavement ones cost just Rs 5 then.

Over the next few years I read the whole lot. Horse, by the way, has an improbable plot which sounds probable only because of the way it’s written.

Then there were those nine novels of three trilogies each. These were the ones with Samson and are absolute masterpieces of the genre. They had linked titles too: Berlin Game, Mexico Set,  and London Match; Hook, Line, and Sinker; Faith, Hope and Charity.

But Deighton’s fame and popularity don’t rest, unlike le Carre’s, on spy novels. He also wrote books about the Second World War called Fighter, Bomber and SS-GB in which England loses the war and the Germans rule it. It, too, was made into a TV serial. It used to be on Netflix.

There are three or four more books. Together the lot make up his history collection. These, I am afraid, weren’t very enjoyable. There was a forced quality to them.

Quite similarly le Carre also wrote some non-spy novels like A Murder of Quality in which Smiley started his career and The Naive and Sentimental Lover. Neither set the Thames on fire.

Unlike le Carre, who developed quite a sentimental Left view of the world, Deighton remained faithful to his calling of entertainment. There are no value judgements about what constitutes appropriate and moral conduct by the ruling establishment.

Both, however, created utterly unromantic worlds of espionage where the usual derring-do was absent. What was there was persistent cold greyness with drizzle most of the time. It was an awful world, the opposite of Ian Fleming.

The wonder is that the British public lapped up all three, possibly because each appealed to different socio-economic categories. Deighton occupied the middle ground between Fleming’s lowbrow stuff and le Carre’s highbrow.

It’s also worth noting that of all the countries that fought in the Second World War, England produced the most combat and spy novels. Fortunately, that obsession seems to have gone now. 

Having lost the Empire, it would seem the Brits loved to live in a world of nostalgia where they always came out on top. Let alone Fleming and Deighton, even the sophisticated le Carre was a victim of that sense of maudlin longing.